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I'm super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone. Even though it may take a while for specialists. I even get benefits for going to free appointments at the dentist. Safes money and pain later, leading to more productiveness as well.
Was really weird watching "Breaking Bad" just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂). Being in a hospital, receiving anything I needed just by showing my insurance card (for which I didn't have to pay anything either as I was without a job at that point). And as long as our government ain't complete dicks I'm more than glad to pay that back.
The US just weirds me the fuck out. I don't get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
What's worse is that millions of people actually find the idea of paying a dime for anyone else's healthcare disgusting. And we don't even get to have a super low tax rate. We just spend our tax money on murdering children across the globe instead of caring for our own. Millions of us see it and oppose it but our society is just sick enough with enough asshole republicans gaming the system in a way that keeps us from doing a fucking thing about it. I wish we were as civilized as nations like Germany.
More than once, I hear an ad on the radio about good Christians coming together to help pay each other's medical bills and think to myself that is the very thing they hate so much.
But they get to choose whose medical bills get paid. They can make sure that only "good Christians deserving of Jesus' mercy" are the ones getting assistance. Not some stranger in the urban ghettos with children born out of wedlock, etc.
These are the people that will make the distinction between "drug addict" and "person with substance use disorder" based on demographics like race, socioeconomic status, and religion.
Uhhh no it’s not?
It’s literally a system where only Christians get benefits.
I’m also assuming one can be denied benefit if they were not a good enough Christian.
Some people consider the consent part of that arrangement to be key.
Edit: German budgets work differently from how I thought. I’ll delete this soon, but I’ll let this edit propagate. The following argument is flawed; the numbers I was looking at were only the federal budget numbers, so I’m not convinced these are fair comparisons
Not trying to shill for military spending, nor do I like it when my government or the governments of their allies murder children but… Both the US and Germany spend around 10-12% of tax income on defense. Germany actually spends a significantly smaller proportion of tax income on health.
Welfare spending (incl. pensions) is a much smaller proportion in the US though, so it is fair to say the US is spending less on looking after its own people. But I don’t think it’s fair to say it isn’t looking after its own people because of the military spending
Neoliberals are also in on it too, not just republicans. And that's our system. It's all fucked top to bottom.
I knew someone would say something like this. But it's not the same. I've discussed this a million times. If you're willing to admit Republicans are many, many times worse then maybe we can talk. If you're going to erase the difference then it's a no-go from me
If you are going to erase the damage and disgusting acts of neoliberals, then it is also a no go from me.
Enjoy your bOtH SiDeS
Not the person you’re responding to, but enjoy being taken for a ride. There’s always a Joe Lieberman, a Kyrsten Sinema, a Joe Manchin, or a senate parliamentarian (what?) to act as a foil, preventing any leftward movement at all and instead ratcheting right.
Neoliberals will sooner appease fascists than act as traitors to their class by doing anything left wing at all.
We are fucked either way it's just a matter of damage control. A third party win simply won't be tenable anytime soon. I really tire of this conversation. No one has ever convinced me there's any chance a third party could even get over 10% of votes. It's not remotely believable. Seriously are you guys on heavy drugs? I honestly cannot fathom believing that route could ever, ever work.
No, democracy itself doesn’t work. It’s a facade where the public thinks they have a choice when in reality there’s no choices and everything is back room deals that enrich corrupt politicians (nearly all of them) and industry. You just admitted it yourself saying how third parties are impossible. How do you not see how you’re a mark (like most of the American public) being fooled? Is it even a democracy when our candidates are chosen for us? the democrats havent run a primary that they didn’t try to ratfuck since 2004! in 2008 they tried and failed to ratfuck Obama and install Hillary, not that it mattered because the second he came into office he did a complete 180 and broke every promise he made to get himself elected.
Our country needs a second revolution and our government needs to be overthrown. Capitalism needs to be abolished.
Our brutal imperialism around the world led by both parties enthusiastically is not “damage control”. People starving and living in the streets while we have endless money for imperialist wars of choice is not damage control.
Just the other day in vermont where I live a homeless couple died of exposure after our supermajority liberal government threw them out of the hotel program because our liberal public is sick and tired of paying higher taxes. Meanwhile we have the highest homelessness rate and highest rate of vacant second/third/fourth/fifth homes for the rich globalist class that makes their money stealing our wages. People dying from capitalism enthusiastically supported by both parties is not damage control. Our supermajority state legislature of liberals is comprised almost entirely of rich property and business owners. An average person like myself can’t be a politician because it doesn’t pay a living wage so you need a second job, and a second job is not flexible enough to support being a politician for a few months a year. It’s classist as fuck by design.
Yeah, it’s BOTH PARTIES. liberals like to pretend they’re holier than you but scratch one (raise their property taxes) and the poorly hidden fascist inside them comes out. They’re ok with bombs being dropped on brown people abroad so long as it’s a gay black trans woman dropping them. They’re ok with their fellow Vermonters dying from exposure so long as their property taxes don’t go up.
Fucking tankie
Ah yes, being a leftist of the anarchocommunist / libertarian socialist persuasion totally makes me a tankie, somebody who supports “communist” authoritarian governments like the famously “communist” modern day Russia or China. LMFAO.
I love how all you have to respond to a valid argument against the US waging its imperialist wars of choice abroad while its citizens suffer greatly at home with rising homelessness, living paycheck to paycheck with no savings for emergencies, and no healthcare, is ad hominem “tankie”. It’s not even accurate. Libs have zero political knowledge, after all, they’ve been voting blue no matter who for decades now as our country descends into fascist chaos. How’s that working out for you, libshit? You gonna vote even harder next election? that will show them! And now they’re gonna peacefully transfer power to fascists after bleating about them for the last 8+ years.
Get fucked, liberal. Enjoy the trump presidency, you earned the fascism.
It's all manipulation, Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly. In general, unless you're talking about bigotry and deep-seated prejudice, most of the dumb stuff Americans believe, we have been essentially force fed.
In this case, for historical reasons I don't remember ATM, it became normalized for employers to offer health insurance and for that to be the primary way people obtained health insurance. Combine that with the strategy to teach poor white people to hate on minorities, as a way to feel superior to someone and thus less angry about their own lot, and you can start to see how the link between employment and healthcare can be seen by some as a moral situation - the person without the good job to get the healthcare must be lazy, and since we don't want to encourage laziness, it's therefore acceptable (even preferred!) not to take care of them.
I can't stress enough how much effort is put into teaching a huge portion of America to fear and hate, constantly. We wouldn't be this bad otherwise, we're pretty normal folks by and large. Even pretty kind and generous, often. We've just been really fucked up, and very deliberately.
It was during the Great Depression and WWII that employer-provided health insurance took off. The fed instituted a wage freeze to combat inflation in the 40s, and as a result, employers had to start offering other incentives like health insurance to attract/retain their workforce.
FDR wanted to pass universal healthcare (along with a lot of other progressive policies) under his Second Bill of Rights, but it never came to be. Had his ideas been enshrined in law, we'd have universal healthcare, a minimum livable wage, adequate housing, the right to work, and several others.
Thanks, I vaguely remembered it being related to WWII and being intended as a temporary stopgap measure due to having few other options, it being a rough time...but I didn't remember the details well enough to cite like that. We ought to make this a bit of common knowledge, truly!
Entire organizations (insurance companies) who do not facilitate health and well-being in any significant way at all - and often impede it, with real commitment! - profit massively from this dysfunction, while both patients AND caregivers suffer mightily, to feed the parasite.
That combined with the fact that the "health insurance via employment" system was set up as essentially a crisis response which should never have been maintained...just really needs to be hammered home.
Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly
I would argue that there has been a shift to exactly that, and it's tied to everything happening alongside for-profit health care. America has a fetish for "self reliance" that has IMO been corrupted into "You're on your own, sucker. Got mine." instead of the ability to build a life from the land, which is likely part of the reason self-reliance ever became so important. Self-reliance also gets pushed by those who have the luxury to say it, already safe in some kind of wealth, or at least to those they look down on who have a hard time rising even to a modest level of financial self actualization. Self-reliance is pretty much the same as "picking oneself up by his/her bootstraps" these days.
The grind of the Capitalist Machine gets worse every year with the never-ending pressure to make the quarterly report better and more profitable, infinitely. That improvement comes at the cost of, well...ever increasing costs, more expensive benefits like healthcare, and having to work more for less buying power. All that on top of the fact that one bad event in one's life could send you into poverty because that self reliance twisted into bootstraps has dictated slashing taxes, and slashing those taxes has had a focus on destroying social programs that help people not be so poor, because it's your fault if you're not self-reliant, and people have decided that it's better to hoard what they can, particularly their money, and blame others for being have-nots. Why should I help some lazy (fill in the blank) when I have (insert difficulty here)?
I have very little to disagree with here, and I somewhat accept your premise that we're being driven to be the thing we're behaving as. I mean, that'd just be "fake it til you make it" in a particularly gross context.
However - I've drank beers (and bad shots, why not) around exactly the kinda folks you'd expect to find in some of the diviest bars in parts of rural America that barely (or don't) have a grocery store. Some of those folks are irredeemable, don't get me wrong. A whole lot of them, though, are truly decent folks who've been completely misled.
That was a work thing that I hated and left behind some years ago, but I know very personally two current Trump voters. If you reduce those 2 people to a ballot, pretty easy to condemn them. If you know them the way I do, it's just blatantly obvious they have no idea who and what they voted for. They were fooled, conned, by a known successful conman. It's really that simple.
Edit: redundancy
Because they are constantly conned and have no idea how they are voting somehow makes them good and ok? Idk still seems insanely ignorant and dangerous to me.
I'm not making excuses for them, and I intend to keep track of the most egregious things that happen under the upcoming Trump administration so I can say to them "is this what you wanted? We knew this would happen and voted against it, you voted for it, is this what you wanted?"
And I never said their ignorance makes them good and okay, what a silly idea. They are good people first - one of them, for example, fought for custody of his kids and raised them as a single dad. It was super necessary and he did it very well. That's a few steps beyond just "okay", anyway.
There’s that line from MiB: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
While not entirely accurate (there are plenty of dumb individuals, willfully so or otherwise), to paraphrase it a little that encountering individuals one-on-one is almost always great. People can be really interesting, and are generally pretty cool. As soon as hot button topics pop up, the ideology kicks in, and they’re not so cool or interesting anymore. They get angry, mulish, and make it personal.
While I do know just what you mean (and find that line useful too), I'm not describing the same thing you are. I'm describing people I know very well who don't substantially disagree with me on hot button topics, but have been fooled into voting against the things they actually care about.
I'm not describing casual acquaintances that don't work out once people get to know one another, I've absolutely had that experience though.
That's not on the people though, but the system. What has been said in this thread - that US citizens ain't as bad as they're being thought of - can be applied to literally anyone, anywhere. Having a background of abuse and having learned of the botched Stanford Prison nonsense as well as the Tongan Castaways, I came to believe that we are indeed inherently good as long as we're properly cared for, i.e. no existential fears or neglect. It's hard not to immediately point out awful shit being done, but once you look into the people conducting it you can always find either a cause for their individual worldview to be so corrupted or a systemic cause making them believe to act morally correct. That, or the responsibility is put on someone else freeing them from any of it - as can be seen with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the guards were acting kind and humane until being instructed by the Professor to not be; who held both responsibility and authority, fucking the whole shit up. This was only discovered around 2015. Nobody looked closer back then as the original believe of "human bad, human needs to be controlled" was initially confirmed, something culturally engraved and pushed by books and movies like "Lord of the Flies".
Causing existential fear by putting everything you need behind a paywall - even down to something as fundamental as water in many cases - and enshrining unethical behaviour into law and an economical system created with the expectation of humans being inherently greedy, selfish and only held back by fear… the only reason why a society like that remains stable IS that people ain't inherently bad despite everything. Same for other countries.
Probably one reason why religion is so alluring to many, another US thing that can turn out to become a problem (like right now, christo-fascism is a thing). The desire for good, and to be good in a world that, in a believe of fellow humans being bad and selfish, we keep making worse unnecessarily.
So yeah, we the people of this world are fine. It's the US system that weirds me the fuck out.
Oh yes, the US system is based more and more on “crabs in a bucket”. I mean, it’s always kinda been like that, but now it’s industrialized. Get yours, get famous, fuck everyone else.
I'm not familiar with Tongan Castaways but will have to give it a look. I felt similarly abused by the revelations of the Stanford Prison Experiment - my understanding of the experiment (pre reveal) did shape, to some degree, my understanding of humanity.
As I've gotten older and times have gotten more fraught, it's become clearer and clearer that most people are fundamentally pretty decent, pretty "meh" at knowing what's important to focus on (or even likely or possible to be accurate), and - critically - most of us are very vulnerable to fear-based manipulation. Those three traits are not as discordant as they seem.
Unrelatedly, I find it odd but endearing that you seem to use "ain't" kinda routinely, as a German, lol. Even lotsa Americans don't. That's not a veiled accusation, btw, you seem genuine to me and I simply wonder how you came by it. Sharing things is great, for my part as much as I love odd beers and experimentation, y'all's Reinheitsgebot has improved my life in a non-trivial way, hahaha
Wait, isn't "ain't" commonly used? If there is some "undertone" to it of being not genuine please tell me, I would never know otherwise. 😅
"Ain't" is fairly regional in the US, and also kind of a class indicator. Class is not quite right but it's close. In general you find it used a lot more frequently in the south, and also generally in lower income populations. It's also less common among folks for whom English is their 2nd (+) language.
If you like it, keep using it! Language should feel good.
Edit: missed your "please tell me" part - it does stick out a bit the way you use it. It's a very casual and informal word, almost to the point of being crass, and it doesn't normally get used in the kinds of eloquent writing you do.
Yes but also the brainwashing wouldn't be effective if Americans didn't eat it up, which they do. It takes two to tango and the population here is really ignorant on many fronts, and that's not just the media or government's fault.
And arguing that Americans aren't really psycho doesn't work that well especially with the elections and their beliefs in general. Americans seem the most psycho to me, but hey I just live here.
I really don't think Americans have some unique makeup that makes us different, we're all just humans. What's different in America is the effort spent and the success achieved in manipulating our population to be hateful and scared.
I do take your point though, we are still culpable. It does take two to tango.
Was really weird watching “Breaking Bad” just as I had cancer myself years ago (Cancer-free today 🙂).
Congratulations, friend! 🎊
And as long as our government ain’t complete dicks
By "complete dicks" you mean people like Friedrich Merz?
Fotzenfritz
Merz, Lindner, Söder… pick your poison. Anyone who wants to dismantle our solidarity systems instead of fixing (or even expanding) them.
We can only hope for our politicians to learn enough from the utter disaster in places like Britain to at least leave them be.
Even here, "cosmetic" dental work can be pricey. IIRC, my braces were covered by insurance, but the retainer wire after that had to be paid up front by my parents with some kind of "insurance will pay back 80% of it after ten years" clause. One has fully broken off and should have long been replaced, the other broke partially and should be replaced too, but I don't really have the money to drop 600 on that right now if I don't know how much I'll get back.
I'm super grateful in this regard to live in Germany, where free doctor visits are not a benefit of something but fucking minimum for literally everyone.
Stimmt so aber nicht ganz. Die meisten Leute glauben bei uns wäre die Krankenversicherung verpflichtend, aber nicht jeder Staatsbürger ist krankenversichert.
Shit, das Problem habe ich tatsächlich übersehen. 🫣
Zumindestens ist das Problem auch als solches deklariert, da müsste definitiv nachgebessert werden. Ich würde jedoch behaupten das, im Vergleich zur USA, hier die Ausnahme die Regel bestätigt. Rein rechtlich hat hier jeder Krankenversicherungsschutz, es müssen "nur" diese Löcher gestopft werden durch die manche Menschen fallen.
I'm Italian and here public healthcare gets worse every day, thanks to continuous budget cuts and political incompetence. Nowadays if you want get blood tests in my region you have to wait months, or go through insurance, usually provided by... Your employer. Fuck them all.
Ouch. There is a big medical school here and there is a decent amount of medical offices in the area. I can walk down the road in the morning for standard blood work and view my test results on my phone by the afternoon. Specialists can still be months of waiting though.
I'm sorry to hear that… I expected something like this the moment the fascists won though. As far as I know you also lost social security (as in money for the jobless), right?
We probably have this in our future as well. Despite our government generally doing a good job (despite & except the neoliberal dick who once was our finance minister and just got fired) in this last legislature, far-right media propaganda is simply overwhelming. A christo-fascist outcome isn't too unlikely next time. 😔 It will wreak havoc on everything.
Yeah no the fascists don't have anything to do with this, or better, they're just the last of a list of legislatures going back to the 90s who kept cutting the public services' budgets, with a big upturn after the 2008 subprime crisis.
No we haven't lost unemployment pay, they removed, for better or for worse, what the previous government instituted and labelled as "universal basic income", which in the end took the form of a more generous unemployment pay, but we still have the standard one.
The truth is there's actually very little difference between "left" and "right" governments nowadays: 10 years ago Renzi, with an allegedly left-wing government, actuated the biggest removal of workers right in recent history... They're all rich kids anyway, all they care about is taking more and more money from the general populace.
Here in privatized US it takes ages to see specialists AND regular doctors!
It's not even selfish. It bites the people who fight for it in a thousand different ways.
It's just silly. If they were any good at being selfish, they'd want people to have healthcare, because everybody else's shit makes your world better or worse regardless of your money or whether you acknowledge it.
The USA is The Land of Personal Responsibility™
I’m an American immigrant in Germany, and solidarity is exactly the word I’ve been using to describe the difference between the cultures. I work in a bakery part-time (as a salesperson) while studying, and it’s very different working in customer service in Germany from how it is in the US, because people here see you as a part of society in a way they don’t there.
Not everyone. Not if you have private insurance.
I don't get this selfish lack of solidarity towards your fellow humans.
It's because the US is far too big. People in one part of it have a very different culture to people in a different part of it, as a result they find it hard to empathize with them because their lives are so completely different. The problem is that they are all one country and operate under one government.
The individual state governments help a little bit (except when they're trying to write laws to one-up each other), but basically the US government is trying to implement laws that will apply across wildly different cultural ideologies.
From the highly religious almost zealot south (Texas, Florida), to the mostly secular north east (Washington), to the liberal west (California), to the farming belt in the Central regions.